ATLANTA — In appellate courts where most matters revolve around wills, contracts and career criminals, it’s not often that one case includes fame, money, sex and a civil-rights icon.

Just such a novelty is pending before the Georgia Supreme Court concerning two native Atlantans who have made vastly different claims on the same rights of personal freedom.

Joe Francis, the impresario of the Girls Gone Wild franchise, was born five years after the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Even though Francis is white and was born five years after King’s death, the black preacher who led a non-violent movement for social change could play a big role in the businessman’s affairs.

The Georgia Supreme Court is deciding whether it does, based on Monday’s oral arguments.

Francis began marketing videos of young women flashing their breasts at New Orleans’ Marti Gras celebrations in exchange for plastic beads. To get more material, he expanded into capturing women exposing themselves on beaches and bars.

In 2000, a 14-year-old Cartersville girl exposed herself to two men with a camera in exchange for beads while on a spring-break trip to Panama City, Fla., with friends. Only later did she learn that a videotape of the incident was included in a series Francis marketed with a still photo of her on the cover.

The girl suffered so much teasing from classmates and even teachers that she changed high schools three times and wasn’t allowed to play sports.

So at age 18, she filed a 2004 lawsuit, which has finally wound its way to the state’s highest court in a circuitous way. That’s because she filed suit in federal court, but the Judge Julie Carnes, chief of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, has a few questions about state law for the Supreme Court before she formulates her own ruling.

“That plaintiff behaved foolishly and recklessly by baring herself to a stranger with a camera is an obvious fact,” Carnes wrote. “Yet, 14-year-old middle schoolers sometimes do stupid things, with little thought for future consequences.

“One might reasonably expect that there would be a civil remedy for a 14-year-old against a defendant who, without the consent of the young woman or her parents, has plastered the girl’s semi-nude image on a video cover and then paraded that image on nationwide television advertisements,” the judge continued. “Yet the type of conduct engaged in by Joe Francis and his companies is of rather recent vintage, and it is not at all clear that the law has caught up with this kind of vulgar exploitation of a young girl.”

It is not uncommon for federal judges to pose questions to state high courts, which is what Carnes did.

“The question therefore is whether Georgia law has, in fact, expressed condemnation of defendants’ conduct by the creation of a cause of action for a plaintiff who has been so ill used,” she wrote.

This is where King comes in. The suit relies on a 1982 decision by the Georgia Supreme Court dealing with the “appropriation” of a person’s image without consent.

In that case, a federal court also submitted questions to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled against a man selling unauthorized, plastic busts of King’s image after his death. The Georgia justices concluded that all people, even the famous, have the right to control the use of their image, and relatives retain that right after an individual’s death.

It also conceded that people have a “right of publicity” in addition to a right of privacy. That means individuals get control over how their image is used in advertisements, like a ballplayer cashing in on baseball cards, wrote the late Chief Justice Harold Hill.

Francis’ attorneys argue that ruling doesn’t apply because his videos aren’t ads but rather, “‘Girls Gone Wild’ is an expressive work, like a motion picture, that aims to entertain and inform; it does not promote the sale of any products or services.”

Besides, they add, a previously anonymous, small-town teenager isn’t famous so her image has no commercial value to cheat her out of.

It’s interesting that Hill wrote the decision because he also wrote the state constitution, which includes an explicit right to privacy not found even in the U.S. Constitution.

“Therefore, we hold that the appropriation of another’s name and likeness, whether such likeness be a photograph or sculpture, without consent and for the financial gain of the appropriator is a tort in Georgia, whether the person whose name and likeness is used is a private citizen, entertainer, or as here a public figure who is not a public official,” Hill wrote.

Another interesting wrinkle is Judge Carnes’ assertion that video marketing and technology had moved into an area that lawmakers hadn’t contemplated. It was exactly that reason that Georgia’s Supreme Court became the first high court in the nation to delineate a right of privacy in 1905 when it ruled against an insurance company for an ad with the unauthorized photo of artist Paolo Pavesich.

The King case contained a separate dissent that contemplated Francis’ argument and the complexity of the issue. It was written by the late Justice Charles Weltner, widely recognized as a champion of freedom of expression.

“Because in proclaiming this new ‘right of publicity,’ we have created an open-ended and ill-defined force which jeopardizes a right of unquestioned authenticity — free speech,” Weltner wrote.

After all, Georgia had a constitution guaranteeing free speech 14 years before the U.S. Constitution did.

The current generation of Supreme Court justices, whose bench is supervised by a — presumably authorized — painting of Weltner, has a few months to balance the rights of privacy and publicity with the right of free speech. What images will pop up in the back of their minds while they sort it out?

Walter Jones is the bureau chief for the Morris News Service and has been covering state politics since 1998. He can be reached at walter.jones@morris.com, 404-589-8424 or on Twitter @MorrisNews.